


Words Are Stones

by Stria (Asia117)



Series: Skam girls appreciation week [4]
Category: SKAM (TV)
Genre: Books, Character Study, Gen, Politics, i mean sana and jonas are def radical y'all, more like a radical political essay pretending to be a character study but
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 15:53:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10221914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asia117/pseuds/Stria
Summary: She could feel the book on a deep, personal level, as if the words written on the paper were in reality being carved into her soul just as she carried on reading. She was, like Maalouf, someone caught in between two identities, caught in a world that wanted her to compartmentalise and divide and isolate each trait, and ignore the most diverse one. She cried, reading the book, then thanked her mother profusely, and started carrying the book everywhere she went.[Or, Sana reads, and gets involved in radical politics.]





	

**Author's Note:**

> Before you start reading, I want to say that this is probably not for everybody. It's really a mini political essay with a "bibliography" post I made on tumblr because I couldn't stop thinking of what Sana would read if she was in political sciences with Jonas. I understand that radicalism is not for everybody, and I respect it. This is why I'm warning you here, if you really don't feel like reading about capitalism and things like that, you can close the tab. If you do, enjoy your reading.
> 
> Fourth story for [girls week](https://skamwlwnet.tumblr.com/post/157746314299/the-skam-wlw-net-presents-the-skam-girls), for the theme "strong female role model". I twisted this a bit, because I'm old, like I'm almost 25, and I'm honestly too old to think about any of the Skam characters as a role model. So I made Sana have a role model, or, more like, role models. Those are also my role models, in the story, tbh. So like, almost.
> 
> Title taken from [Words are Stones](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/294552.Words_are_Stones) by Carlo Levi; if you want to read it, it's an amazing book.

_Le lacrime non sono più lacrime ma parole,_

_E le parole sono pietre._

_(Carlo Levi, Words are Stones: Impressions of Sicily. 1955)_

When Sana was little, her mother used to carry a small book, _Identitet som dreper_ by Amin Maalouf, always with her. Sana remembers this vividly, remembers the battered copy always being in her mother’s purse, the paperback cover getting dirty and crumpled, and yet she never went somewhere without that book.

When Sana was thirteen, her mother gave that book to her as a birthday present; she wasn’t happy at first, but she was in that period of her life where she read everything she could with a voracity that probably went lost in university books and academic readings, afterwards. So she read it anyway, and she understood why her mother carried it with her.

She could feel the book on a deep, personal level, as if the words written on the paper were in reality being carved into her soul just as she carried on reading. She was, like Maalouf, someone caught in between two identities, caught in a world that wanted her to compartmentalise and divide and isolate each trait, and ignore the most diverse one. She cried, reading the book, then thanked her mother profusely, and started carrying the book everywhere she went.

It wasn’t the only book that carved itself a place in Sana’s soul. When she read _Latin-Amerikas åpne blodårer_ she spent a whole sleepless night trying to finish it all at once, and she had her own Naomi Klein period, spent preaching the benefits of reading _No Logo_ and _Sjokkdoktrinen_ (which then became reading everything she could find written by Stiglitz. He was so cool, before he joined the occupy movement. Anyway). Nevertheless, she always returned to _Identitet_ , read it so many times she could recite entire pieces from the book. She almost took French in high school because of it, too.

Luckily, she came to her senses at the last moment and took German instead. She would probably never met Chris and the others if she took French.

_Descolonicemos lo que nos enseñaron  
Con nuestro pelo negro, con pómulos marcados_

_(Ana Tijoux, Vengo)_

Sana is a political animal, and she doesn’t deny it. She gets shit from some people when they learn she’s religious and yet with radical tendencies, and she gets shit from some other people when they learn she studies political sciences instead of staying home waiting for a husband. The hijab police _and_ the islamophobes can go fuck themselves with a cactus, and Sana remains the same.

Almost paradoxically, the one person she shares the most with is Jonas, now. She met him through Isak, and when they discovered they went at the same faculty, it was already a done deal. With Jonas, it’s easy to politicise everything and spend hours talking about the latest issue with the world and the books they read. Jonas reads a lot of poetry; she gets him a Mahmoud Darwish collection for his birthday, and gets him into Edward Said some time later. In exchange, he gets her _Dependency and Development in Latin America_ ; she reads it in a week, and then they wonder together if maybe studying economics would have been more proficuous. They conclude they’re too radical to get in a faculty like that one.

(But more often than not their conversation boil down about the refugees and the Palestinian situation, let’s be honest.)

(“They’re all acting like we didn’t create this situation,” says Jonas one day, and he’s smoking a joint like the worst of clichés, but Sana’s used to it now.

“They like to act surprised anyway. How could it ever happened, why are _they_ coming here, and so on.”

“The western world stands on the shoulders of the majority of the world, anyway.”

Sana nods and snorts. “People like to forget about geopolitics.”)

(“It’s just, like, imagine you’ve lived in a flat all your life, and your parents before you, and your grandparents before them, and so on and so forth. And suddenly people invade your flat and sentence that other people are gonna live there. And you’re left with the bathroom and the kids room.” Sana takes a deep breath. “Wouldn’t you be angry?” She asks.

Eva blinks, bites her lip. “Of course I would, yeah?” She sounds insecure.

“It’s more complicated than this,” Jonas says, and passes the joint to Noora. “But it does give you an idea. If you don’t want to read Ilan Pappè.”

Eva rolls her eyes. “I swear, you two have become the _worst_ since you started uni.”)

Jonas doesn’t complain when she proposes to go to some demonstration, and when he fucks up he listens and says she’s sorry.

And they can go snowboarding together, which is always a plus in Sana’s book.

ما في بعض مثل الشعب العربي  
فرجوني إي أمّة في الدنيا أكثر مؤثّرة  
الصورة واصحة احنا الحضارة  
تاريخنا و تراثنا هي الشاهد على وجودنا

( _Shadia Mansour, The kufiyah is Arab_ )

It really starts like a game, the one she plays. She’s a Muslim woman, and she wants to find more people like her, Muslim and women and who write books she’s interested in reading.

(That kind of non-fiction is not the only thing she reads, of course. She loves Marjane Satrapi, and her quest for Muslimas writers started from Malala Yousafzai. And she enjoys western writers as much as the next person. But her heart will forever lie with that kind of non-fiction.)

She meets Asmaa Abdol-Hamid at a rally at her university, and she’s with Jonas and for a moment she wishes she wasn’t, because the feelings she gets from that are huge, overwhelming and absolutely personal. She’s a young, radical hijabi, and she refuses to shake hands with men. Sana almost cries because here it is, the proof that there’s someone who’s exactly like here, who values religion a lot and at the same time has a radical view of the world. She listens almost enraptured to everything she says, and afterwards, she goes to thank her for everything.

(Afterwards, when she’s calmed down a bit and the tears have stopped threatening her, Jonas makes a face at her and goes on a long rave about how that rally was the best and that fucking racist Anders got his ass served for believing Islam couldn’t be radical. Suck it, Anders.

Sana just smiles.)

She reads Shirin Ebadi, and she reads Huda Shaarawi, and she starts maybe thinking about getting into politics for real, because she’s interested and because she kind of wants to be like Asmaa Abdol-Hamid. Jonas tells her he would absolutely be her first supporter, and will be at her rallies with ridiculously huge signs to show it. Sana smiles and thinks, maybe.

“You can’t be _this_ radical, though,” adds Jonas with a chuckle, and Sana rolls her eyes.

“I’ll be as radical as I want, watch me ruling Norway with this exact costume.”

Jonas throws his head back and laughs. They’re at a Halloween party, and for once he’s not in the back smoking weed, but they’re sitting on a couch a bit hidden from where the main stage of the party is, and they’re having a good chat. They’re all almost sober, which is a first.

“That’s something I want to witness.” Even wiggles his eyebrows at Sana, who mimes dusting off her shoulder.

“I could be absolutely capable of owning everyone. But to be honest it would probably be because they have no idea who am I dressed as.”

She’s been on the receiving end of curious stares since they got into the party, but nobody has got the courage to ask her who she’s dressed up as, and then everything died down the drunker people got.

“You’re still risking it, I’d say,” Jonas gestures towards the poor imitation of the ak-47 she’s got with her. She didn’t want to buy a toy gun, so she took a stick and wrote AK-47 on it in sharpie. “It’s not that visible but still.”

Chris shifts close to her and gives her a side hug, squinting at Jonas. “I’m ready to defend her with my body, if contestations arise. Just watch me.”

“Okay, but seriously, who are you dressed up as?” Vilde raises one eyebrow and gestures at the kufiyah she has as headscarf, and the green jacket.

“You mean Sana’s absolute supreme idol she won’t ever leave behind?” Asks Jonas, and Sana chuckles.

“Leila Khaled,” she says.

**Author's Note:**

> Okaaay so, if you want to know what Sana reads, the post is [here](http://nooradeservedbetter.tumblr.com/private/158263423821/tumblr_omf0y8yeru1qhs33a). It's all pretty classic books, and they're really worth reading, I think. If you want to know who the women I talked about in the fic are,  
> [Naomi Klein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein)  
> [Ana Tijoux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Tijoux)  
> [Shadia Mansour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadia_Mansour)  
> [Marjane Satrapi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjane_Satrapi)  
> [Asmaa Abdol-Hamid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmaa_Abdol-Hamid)  
> [Shirin Ebadi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_Ebadi)  
> [Huda Shaarawi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huda_Sha%27arawi)  
> [Leila khaled](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled)
> 
> As per usual, if you liked it consider leaving a kudo or commenting, that keeps me going! Or come to find me on [tumblr](http://nooradeservedbetter.tumblr.com)!


End file.
